from Hacker News

Our Responsibility as Analytics Providers: Building Trust in Your Product

by goldvine on 7/21/15, 7:49 PM with 1 comments

• by MichaelCrawford on 7/21/15, 10:24 PM

    127.0.0.1 www.hosted-pixel.com
  

  You can edit /etc/hosts on your mobile device if you jailbreak it; on iOS there is iFile from Cydia or you can maintain it in your box then load it with scp. Some models of Android devices permit you to load firmware yourself.

  You can block web and mobile bug servers at your firewall.

  You could in principle hack a DNS server to return 127.0.0.1 for analytics servers but I dont know of a nameserver that actually does so.

  I am completely cool with you analyzing your own web server logs. What I am not down with is you correlating my activities at two or more different sites.

  I dont install any mobile apps that I dont absolutely require - not even the free ones - because many of them use mobile analytics. The sdks are free as in beer but the services use entire data centers. Data centers are very costly; someone must be paying for all that.

  I know of an analytics service that is used for credit risk evaluation. I dont recall its URL but I will dig it up again.